Titusville - A crash and exploring backroads

 

Such scary-looking predators 

The boat shook and I popped up out of the hatch to see what happened. It turns out that a boat two slips down from us tried to back into a slip, stopped when it became apparent he wasn't going to make it, restarted going bow in with some speed since the wind was picking up - but when he tried to get out of forward gear, he found it was stuck. Onward he went, crashing into the dock and pulling up a piling that's now leading sideways in the water. 

An yet a nearby turtle seemed unconcerned - but maybe he should be concerned?!

They had to cut two dock lines in order to free her up enough to get her parallel to the slip since she was at an angle due to pulling up a piling. I wonder about liability here since the marina's dock was damaged as well as a piling being pulled up. The boat in the adjacent slip was also damaged from being rammed by the errant boat. There's no current in the marina but there is wind on occasion as it was this afternoon - nothing serious, 15 kts perhaps. The real problem was the transmission being stuck in first gear, the captain could not stop the boat going forward. 

This guy kept an eye out on me!

Before that excitement, we explore some of the backroads on Merritt Island. The entire island is a wildlife refuge so even on the backroads, there's plenty of wildlife to see. It was a warm day so the alligators were out in force, sunning and warming up. The birds seemed unconcerned and were in abundance. It's fun getting off the main roads, away from traffic to see the wildlife without cars constantly passing by, temps in the low 80s helped too.